


The Empress of Ice Cream

by Mosca



Series: Five Worlds Without Shrimp [2]
Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Future Fic, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 11:43:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mosca/pseuds/Mosca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old vampires don't get wiser, but they get minions anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Empress of Ice Cream

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this to my Livejournal in May 2005.
> 
> Distraction and k beta read this. I wrote it for the Harmficathon fic exchange. The title is from a Wallace Stevens poem.
> 
> The stories in "Five Worlds Without Shrimp" are all set in different universes, and each one stands alone. Each imagines a world in which the events of AtS are all about the journey of a secondary character.

Harmony keeps a sharpened stake in her medicine cabinet. She's been keeping it there for the last hundred years or so. She's not that interested in explaining to anyone why it's there, even though she's sure that at least a _few_ visitors have noticed. People are curious to know what an increasingly respectable vampire would keep behind her mirror.

Nobody's asked her, though. It's that word, "respectable," that younger vampires use around her and about her, even after she tells them it's annoying. Because "respectable" means old, older than them, older than any plain old sack-of-meat human being has ever lived. Which is a stupid thing to respect. Harmony's not that good of a vampire. She's never started an apocalypse, never served a demon-king with aspirations of world rule, never killed a slayer (even when they were a dime a dozen, back in the twenty-first century). She's good at things like matching her shoes to her handbag. Nobody appreciates that kind of skill anymore — not even in the human world, much less in the moldy basements where the annals of vampire lore get written.

She's good at not dying, is what it is. (She did die once, technically, but that was when she was human, which is different.) When your typing speed is more impressive than your death toll, nobody really wants you as a minion anyway. And when she tried devoting herself to some Venerated Ancient's pet Armageddon, the Venerated Ancient was always more interested in ending the world than in Harmony. She's never deserved to disappear into a crowd. It's been centuries since she's seen her own reflection, but she knows she shines too brightly to be just another flunky.

She thinks Fred told her that. But her brain is running out of room for all the memories she has, so it might have been someone else. It might be something Harmony came up with herself. But she likes to think Fred was the one who told her she's better than all that. Braver and more dangerous than the kind of vampires who die serving a master. If Fred said it, it's got to be wise even if it isn't true.

People think that about stuff Harmony says now. They think she's some kind of magical hermit because she swore off human blood and used her Wolfram & Hart severance package to buy a small Caribbean island without much mystical activity. There was no sense in staying in the city once 'makers got invented and you couldn't go shopping anymore. No sense in eating humans. Withdrawal makes her haggard. Also, when she feeds on people, she overestimates herself. She starts to think she can raise demons from deep beneath the earth and they'll want to be her bar-hopping buddies. 

That shit never works. Look at Fred — look at Illyria. They never care about the minions who bring them back. They only want to raise more demons, or kill the do-gooder du jour, or send all their hardworking, under-compensated minions on quests for mystical accessories. Ugly mystical accessories.

Harmony has minions now. Lots of them. They bring her puppies and lambs to eat and cute new outfits to wear. They guard her house like it's a secret lair of evil. It sort of _is_ a lair of evil, but it's not like it's a secret. Harmony sucks at keeping quiet about stuff, so she tells people everything she remembers. Her minions think she sounds all sage, talking about growing up on the Hellmouth. When you stick around long enough, a Valley Girl accent sounds really ancient and special. Harmony dresses in the latest, but she's never changing the way she talks. It's what gets her minions to make their pilgrimages. There are TVs now that make it like she's right in their living room, 3D and everything, but her minions say there's no substitute for being right there with her.

There are a few minions who even live with her. She figures, what the hell, she's got the space, and there's this one girl who gives kick-ass pedicures. 

Harmony wishes she were happy like her minions. She wishes she were the kind of vampire who's happiest serving someone else, even if it meant having a tragic haircut and being drawn to basements. But her memories keep catching up with her. And people: once every couple of decades, Spike's do-gooding will get close to catching up with him, and she'll let him hide out in her lair for a while. They usually end up having sex, even though she got over him centuries ago and his technique hasn't changed in all that time. Sleeping with Spike is like going to her own funeral, except all the mourners are dead, and she's the only one still alive. She asked Spike if she was crazy for feeling like that, and he said, "No, that's about right."

Sometimes Harmony thinks she bought her island so she wouldn't feel like that ever again. No more humans to care about and betray. And then _still_ feel sad about when they wind up dead.

She thinks it's her fault for not turning them. Fred, especially, that night they went out for drinks. Harmony spent the whole evening trying not to look at Fred's neck. If she hadn't needed Fred to save her from getting fired, Harmony would have turned her. Fred would have made a great vampire, brilliant and ruthless. Together, they would have been unstoppable. Fred by _herself_ would have been unstoppable, but Fred never liked being the leader. She would have made really good plans, and all Harmony would have had to do was say, "Yeah, let's do that." And Fred would have stayed by Harmony's side, because you always fall a little in love with your sire. Harmony would have stayed in love back, because she was more loyal than some people she could name.

Harmony imagines Fred's long white neck. She imagines Fred's skin with the icy sawdust smell of old vampires. Fred's giggle glimmers with evil. She undresses Harmony slowly, admiring each article of designer clothing. Harmony knows that Fred doesn't really care, but Fred has enough room in her brain to keep track of Harmony's favorite designers. "Classic," Fred says, unzipping Harmony's skirt. 

Fred folds everything, or hangs it up. Harmony gets impatient, grinds her heels into the rug. And then Fred's slim hands are exploring Harmony's body, as if Fred is still undressing her, sweet and dizzying as a lemon drop. Fred digs her nails into Harmony's back, grinds against her, works her sharp fingers into Harmony's clit. Harmony comes when Fred tells her she is perfectly worthy of love.

And they live happily ever after. Really forever, and they're always pretty. They sit on the beach at night with their toes in the sea and plot little destructions.

There are ways to have this. If you're better at magic than Harmony is, you can make a portal. Go back in time and fix everything. But she knows that Fred won't love her forever, any more than Spike will. Her evil plans never go according to plan.

There is a sharpened stake in Harmony's medicine cabinet. She takes it out. It's really light, like it would break in her hands before she could shove it through her chest. She puts it back and refreshes her lipstick instead.

One of her minions, Marco, knocks on the doorframe. Marco's writing a book of Harmony's memories; she gave him a room in the basement, and he seems pretty happy there. He wears velour suits, and she thinks he would sweat a lot if he weren't undead. "Mistress, three of our number await you downstairs with fresh piglets," he says. "Will you tell the old stories tonight?"

"I'll be down in a minute," Harmony says. "Let me fix my hair."

After she feeds, her minions crowd around her like demonic kindergarteners. "There was this girl," she says. "And she was beautiful and she was kind and perfect, so of course, she had to die."


End file.
